The Story of Ember comes in the form of Salvation.
Ember has to deal with leaving her family on her own for the first time in her entire life, she was ready for freedom. But when they tell her she has to go with one of the kids she grew up with and...
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I was limp against the wall as I sat on my knees, the boy told me that they were going to come at any moment. He counted every day the time that they came and got their breeders. He assumed they would come when they get the others.
He sat flush against the wall, counting silently with his brow furrowed, his lips silently forming the words.
I stayed in position, my head hanging low as a harsh glare was set to the front of the cage. I had seen the large stomachs on the girls that struggled to keep themselves upright. Their defeated faces, sunken in eyes. Some of them looked as young as Amaya, others as old as Victoria.
I have braved up enough to ask what happens when they give birth. The boy didn't know, he said they went into labor and are forced to give birth on their own in the cell. Everyone else was forced to listen to their screams and pleading.
They would have the baby, and when the next round of guards came, they would pry the child from their arms and whisk them away. All while the mother screams and pleads for those around her to help her, while they could do nothing.
They would leave the mother alone for a few weeks, and then when the weeks of torture and haunting was over, they would be back to be a breeder, fated to have another child ripped away from them again.
He told me the horrors of being a breeder. When your stomach is swollen, and they beat you enough for the child within you to die. There was a girl when he first came here, she was always angry. She would pace the cage up and down. And when it came time for her to give birth, she was silent as she birthed the boy.
She held him in her arms, and when the guard's footsteps sounded, she smothered the child. Holding a hand over his mouth and nose. She was saving him from a life that would no doubt be brutal and harsh. The breeders were the only ones who saw glimpses of the Wanders home, the way that children are beaten for any little mistake. The small dead bodies that laid in the mud.
She couldn't allow her child to suffer through that, so she killed him.
The guards found her with her hand still over his face, a silent tear falling down her face.
They ripped her to shreds, killing her as everyone else in the cages was forced to watch the brave girl suffer and slowly die before their eyes as she was tortured.
It was a warning.
No other breeder had chanced pulling something like that again. Regardless of the baby being ripped from them so soon after birth, the boy thinks that none of them were strong enough to kill their own child and face the wrath of the guard's men.
I admired that woman though.
I had to find the strength that the girl had when she knew she was going to die after killing her own child and did so anyway. I had to find that strength to leave the boy and get the Hell out of here as fast as I could.
